


and the night wasn't night anymore

by paperclipbitch



Category: Doctor Who & Related Fandoms
Genre: Gen, Post-Episode: s07e14 The Name of the Doctor, get-a-girlfriend-jeff is my favourite
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-10-23
Updated: 2013-10-23
Packaged: 2017-12-30 05:18:41
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,594
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1014585
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/paperclipbitch/pseuds/paperclipbitch
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>“I don’t believe in ghosts,” Clara says, “or in coincidences.”</p>
            </blockquote>





	and the night wasn't night anymore

**Author's Note:**

> > [Title from _Gun For A Mouth_ from _Nashville_ , shut up.] This idea came to me in a dream so I had to write it! Am trying to write some short sharp things atm so I can actually finish the longer things languishing on my harddrive. And if my subconscious ships Clara/get-a-girlfriend-Jeff then, well, who am I to judge it? Well, I guess this isn’t shipping yet, but I’d like it to be. I’ve basically imagined how _The Name of the Doctor_ would affect Clara. *shrug* It’s set post that and I guess post the anniversary, but, handwave.

The village is small enough to make a London girl’s shoulders itch, twitching curtains and quiet streets and an honest to god _green_ , a duck pond in the middle of it, and Clara can feel eyes on her, a stranger in a summer dress that isn’t warm enough for the thin drizzle filling the air. Even the curiosity here feels flat, and she remembers running down a road with the sky here filled with _something_ , but she was never here and that never happened and her mind these days is one big album of someone else’s photographs.

She doesn’t have to ask for directions, and that speaks volumes that she’s tired of listening to, keeping her head down, shoes clicking on damp tarmac, and she doesn’t know why she’s _here_. That’s been today’s mantra, really; all through buying her ticket and boarding the train and watching the buildings skin away until there were fields and sky and something in the corner of her eye Clara doesn’t want to look at, all through _all_ of that, Clara was thinking _why am I doing this_ , and this can only end in disappointment.

Really, though, what do you _do_ once you’ve done what you were born to do? That’s a lot of destiny burned up far too fast and whatever’s left alive in here these days needs to keep itself busy _somehow_.

So, here she is. Chasing a ghost, chasing an event she wasn’t present at, chasing something that happened in another lifetime.

Maybe one of these days she’ll even catch up.

-

Clara was expecting to have to explain herself, had half-a-dozen plausible lies prepared. Once you’ve run around the universe long enough, you can talk your way into anywhere on a smile and a handful of words, something about self-belief. She was expecting kids in the garden, perhaps, a mother who’d smile, harassed, and agree to let Clara in for a few minutes, though she wouldn’t offer her tea.

The garden is overgrown and untouched, and the blue paint is peeling off the kitchen door, and no one lives here anymore.

There are weeds under Clara’s feet, and she has to brush past overgrown bushes, drooping under their own weight, and the windows of the house are blank and lifeless.

“This was supposed to _help_ ,” she says aloud to no one in particular, and sits down on the back doorstep, outside this home where reality swallowed itself alive.

-

Clara was perfectly happy _not_ being impossible, you know.

-

It’s tragic how her heart thuds in her chest when she looks up and there’s a tall figure behind the leaves, though it broadens as it comes close and it’s a man she could probably recognise if she flung open the lockbox of _not my life_ she has in her brain nowadays.

She’s been everyone and no one and died more times than anyone really wants to think about, and she isn’t even twenty-five yet. How’s that for bucket lists.

He frowns, scrubs fingers through short hair. “You’re not supposed to be here.”

Clara looks up at her stranger and wonders what he’s doing here, if it’s anything like what she’s doing here, and if that even matters in the end.

“There aren’t any signs,” she tells him, shrugs, keeps her knees together and her eyes wide.

“Local people know not to come here,” he says.

Clara sizes him up carefully; he was local once, but he isn’t anymore, you can see that in his face, in the set of his shoulders. Back for a visit, then.

“What,” she says, “do they think it’s haunted?” Laughter strings through her voice, a little more scornful than she would once have been.

His face is still wary. “Something like that.”

“I don’t believe in ghosts,” Clara says, “or in coincidences.”

She’s not sure what he reads in her face in that moment, but he comes to sit next to her on the doorstep anyway.

-

“You don’t have to leave,” the Doctor told her, quiet, something torn-looking in his eyes. 

He was angry when she met him, bright-angry and bitter-lost and she understands most of it now. There are some feelings that can only be contained by two hearts, and even then, they tremble and bang at their bars. He’s perhaps not angry now, but the softened parts are the frightening ones, their quicksilver sharpness only visible in the darkest of moments, the ones Clara can’t – won’t – look back on.

Secrets will do that to you, in the end.

“I’m not _leaving_ ,” she replied, hand on his arm, no idea if the words were true or not. “I’m taking a sabbatical, that’s all. A bit of time for toast and afternoon naps.”

He screwed up his nose, true sign of a man who’s never taken an afternoon nap. In truth, Clara has held his history in her hands and in her veins and she still has no idea if he sleeps at all.

“You can do that here,” the Doctor reminded her, childish pout, screaming eyes, “the TARDIS makes good toast.”

_I can’t remember which parts of me are me or you or a thousand versions of me who died so you could live_ , Clara thought, tucked the words under her tongue to stay unsaid. _Which, if nothing else, is going to make most future conversations kind of difficult, not to mention awkward._

The Doctor wanted her to stay because she’d seen him at his worst, his very worst, and either he was grateful that she could still look at him, or else he wanted the damage contained where he could keep an eye on it. 

Clara smiled, said nothing, pulled him into a hug that she meant more than she could admit. “I’ll be back,” she told him, unable to figure out whether she was lying.

-

“I’m Jeff,” Clara’s stranger tells her, and holds out a hand.

Clara grits her teeth behind her smile, and takes it.

It’s a flash, a google search behind her retinas, and, yes, _there_ we go.

“You work for UNIT,” she tells him, “and the Doctor’s intervention got you there. You sat there one afternoon with a laptop and your gran bringing you cups of tea and you saved the world.”

Jeff drops her hand like he’s been burnt, and his expression flickers through anger, fear, mistrust, hope and crushing, dreadful loss. Yet another life left trampled by the Doctor’s bigger picture.

“Why are you here,” he says, voice low and tight. “They’re not here, you know.”

“I know,” Clara tells him, because the cemetery was the first place she went to on this list of increasingly bad ideas, tracing back a thread she doesn’t entirely understand. She’s been to plenty of these places now, tracing nostalgic steps backwards, looking for people who mean nothing to her and who she can never speak to because of what she might say. People who don’t recognise her, who don’t see her, and she never knew any of them six months ago.

She can see in Jeff’s eyes at that at least UNIT told him the truth. There are so many unanswered in the world that it’s good when something real is produced, however much it may sting.

Jeff’s friends drifted, bit by bit, and then one day they vanished, and he’ll never see them again, and they’re not quite dead and not quite alive and either way doesn’t really matter to him because all they really are is gone.

UNIT pays well, at least, well enough for Jeff to maintain his grandmother in her final years and live in a London flat and pay for this house to fall into quiet, dignified disrepair, the bored local kids too scared to break in and graffiti the walls or smash the windows.

“I suppose I did meet Amy and Rory,” Clara sighs. By now, her legs are drawn up to her chest, her chin pressed to her kneecap. It’s cold out here, seeping through her cardigan, and everything feels restless, edgy. “Sort of.”

She doesn’t choose to say _I was a dalek at the time_ or _I wasn’t me at the time_ because even if she could bring herself to verbalise those words they don’t sound believable.

Jeff pushes himself to his feet, breathtakingly tall, and offers her a hand. “You’d better come inside,” he says.

-

She wanted to see the world, to try new things, to Captain Kirk her way around new countries (the _boldly going_ part, perhaps not the STIs part), to find herself a bright warm space where things made sense.

Clara was waiting for adventure from childhood, with her books and her worn-out video of _Mary Poppins_ and her dad sitting her on his lap to watch _Star Trek_ , waiting for the spark of something new and different and perhaps better.

And, yes, in many ways, she got what she wanted.

It’s just… well… she’ll never tell the Doctor, of course: Clara wanted adventure, but she _also_ wanted to still resemble herself when it was over.

-

_There’s a crack in my wall_.

Clara’s lips form the word without her consent, and she shuts her eyes, breathes until she’s more than a bundle of memories that haven’t been returned to sender just yet.

She’s seen every single second of the Doctor’s life, been by his side for much of it, whether he knew it or not, and while she’s pretty sure she’s losing the memories the longer she stays away from the TARDIS, there are still more of them than she knows how to contain, spilling out of her eyes like tears, bursting between her teeth.

The house is empty and there is nothing here; forgotten furniture, no electricity, dust, silence.

Jeff watches Clara wander Amelia Pond’s house and doesn’t say anything, expressionless and solemn. She wonders briefly how this looks to him, a mysterious woman who seems to know too much and too little at the same time, turning up to look inside an abandoned house of people she didn’t know.

Dust motes trickle through shafts of ragged daylight, and Clara finds herself looking out of the corner of her eye for something that isn’t there.

That’s what she does these days; she watches the peripherals, the fringes, the pieces. Everything she can see without effort is too straightforward.

“What are you looking for?” Jeff asks at last, as they stand in the half-dark bedroom where Amelia Pond grew up decades after she died. Where the stars winked out and everyone she loved slipped away, only that never happened except for where it did.

Suddenly real tears well up in Clara’s eyes, hot and sticky and almost too immediate for them to be _hers_.

“I’m not looking for anything,” she manages, “I just wanted to come here.”

Jeff lets out a long, slow sigh. “All right,” he says, finally. 

-

They stand by the dirty window and look down at the wilderness below them, a once neat garden swallowed up by weeds, a rusting swing a monument to nothing amongst wild flowers and too-long grass.

“Rory’s dad still comes back here sometimes,” Jeff says quietly, while Clara thinks about being handcuffed to the radiator, watching the pieces of the world crack apart. 

“Why do you keep this place?” Clara asks. Maybe it’s a cruel question, maybe it isn’t. It’s a nice house, a bit of paint and a lawnmower and you’d get a decent price, even in this recession.

“Well,” Jeff murmurs, “it’s a beginning, isn’t it?”

Clara thinks about it, and, well, it is.

“Anyway,” Jeff adds, after a few more minutes of silence, “we’re still pretty sure the Doctor’s going to turn up here sometime, years and years late, looking for Amy. It’s probably best not to get anyone else involved in that.”

The tears prick Clara’s eyes, but she thinks they might be her own this time. She’d wonder if that will ever happen to her, but she’s seen the Doctor’s past and the Doctor’s future – that’s the part she’s trying to forget the quickest, actually – and versions of her are scattered throughout it. She’s the original, but she’s not the _only_.

-

Underneath the empty wardrobe, Clara finds a dusty and crinkled sheet of A4 paper with a clumsy Tardis on it in Crayola blue, Amy’s attempts at spelling added beside it in red. It’s yellowed and the edge is damp and it’s lain here forgotten for a long, long time, but Clara rolls it carefully and puts it in her handbag anyway.

-

There isn’t a cafe in the village – apparently there are some last bastions against Starbucks after all – and Clara finds herself accepting a cup of tea from Jeff before she has time to think it through.

They sit in his grandmother’s kitchen and sip earl grey and swap stories; Clara keeps to ones that actually happened to _her_ , while Jeff sweeps aside levels of security clearance to fill her in on his own personal adventures. Upstairs, his grandmother’s carer reads a magazine while her charge sleeps, and Clara thinks about Jeff’s room, thinks about how that’s a beginning of a different sort too.

“I don’t know why I came here,” Clara admits in the end, hands wrapped around the warmth of the slightly chipped mug, looking away from the kindness and the steadiness in Jeff’s eyes. “And I have no idea why I came here when you did.”

“You think we were supposed to meet?” Jeff asks, doubt in his voice.

“For all I know, I remember us meeting here,” Clara responds, dry and tired, because she doesn’t dream anymore and sometimes when she shuts her eyes all she can see is a time vortex pulling her apart and putting her back together again and taking things away and replacing them with something entirely different.

Jeff’s tea slops onto the table. “What?”

Clara shakes her head. “Not this time, anyway.”

She could explain, but she’s not yet sure that most of this makes sense and she’s already dug through too many of the things in her head that she didn’t put there today, it’s time to leave them be.

“Maybe I was looking for someone to talk to,” she says to the tablecloth.

“I’m not sure that’s me,” Jeff replies.

There are hundreds of people, even in this very specific time period, that she could track down and try to voice something she doesn’t understand at; she can grieve with them about things she wasn’t present for, she can reply to questions she shouldn’t know the answers to. But what exactly is the good of opening up old wounds in people she shouldn’t meet just to discover it’s yet another dead end.

(Martha Jones just looked bemused when Clara told her about how honestly sorry the Doctor still is; she hugged Clara close and laughed into her shoulder, a tired, shaking laugh that Clara could’ve analysed if she wanted to, but knew she shouldn’t.)

“Why not you?” Clara says.

-

On the train home, Clara carefully places Amy’s drawing into her book, skimming her fingers over the space where the most important leaf in the universe once sat and doesn’t anymore.

She didn't think it was possible to start with nothing and still end up with less than you had to begin with.

Still, that’s time travel for you; always teaching you lessons you didn’t particularly want to learn.

On the next page, opposite a photograph of ground zero where Torchwood One once sat, is Jeff’s telephone number, the direct line to UNIT, written in bold black felt-tip.

It’s something new, anyway.


End file.
